Gerti said, “In that same night have I woken up . . .”
“
I woke
up,” the teacher helplessly said.
“
Woke
up,” Gerti Gruner said, “and I have thought, What if it is even now, this exact minute, that one Nazi is knocking at the door, and I am here lying not telling to anybody anything, and I have stood up and gone into the bedroom and woke up the foster mother and the foster father, and next morning has the foster mother gone with me to the refugee committee, and they have found for me another foster family.”
“Your turn, Matsue,” Ilka said. “How, when, and why did you come to the States? We’re going to help you!” Matsue’s written English was flawless, but he spoke with an accent that was well nigh impenetrable. His contribution to class conversation always involved a communal interpretative act.
“Aisutudieddu attoza unibashite innu munhen,” Matsue said.
A couple of stabs and Eduardo, the Madrileño, got it: “You studied at the university in Munich!”
“You studied acoustics?” ventured Izmira, the Cypriot.
“The war trapped you in Germany?” proposed Ahmed, the Turk.
“You have been working in the ovens?” suggested Gerti, the Viennese.
“Acoustic ovens?” marveled Ilka. “Do you mean stoves? Ranges?”
No, what Matsue meant was that he got his first job with a Munich firm employed in soundproofing the Dachau ovens so that what went on inside them could not be heard on the outside. “I made the tapes,” said Matsue. “Tapes?” they asked him. They got the story figured out: Matsue had returned to Japan in 1946 and collected his “Hiroshima tapes.” He had been brought to Washington as an acoustical consultant to the Kennedy Center, and been hired to come to Concordance to design the sound system of the New Theater, subsequently accepting a research appointment in the department of engineering. He was going to return home, having finished his work—Ilka thought he said—on the reverse bug.
Ilka said, “I thought, ha ha, you said ‘the reverse bug’!”
“The reverse bug” was what everybody understood Matsue to say that he had said. With his right hand he performed a row of air loops, and, pointing at the wall behind the teacher’s desk, asked for, and received, her O.K. to explain himself in writing on the blackboard.
Chalk in hand, he was eloquent on the subject of the regular bug, which can be introduced into a room to relay to those outside what those inside would prefer them not to hear. A sophisticated modern bug, explained Matsue, was impossible to locate and deactivate. Buildings had had to be taken apart in order to rid them of alien listening devices. The reverse bug, equally impossible
to locate and deactivate, was a device whereby those outside were able to relay into a room what those inside would prefer not to have to hear.
“And how would such a device be used?” Ilka asked him.
Matsue was understood to say that it could be useful in certain situations to certain consulates, and Paulino said, “My father went to the American consulate,” and put his hand into his breast pocket. Here Ilka stood up, and, though there were still a good fifteen minutes of class time, said, “So! I will see you all next Thursday. Everybody—be thinking of subjects you would like to talk about. Don’t forget the symposium tomorrow evening!” and she walked quickly out the door and drove herself home.
Ilka entered the New Theater late and was glad to see Matsue sitting on the aisle in the second row from the back with an empty seat beside him. The platform people were settling into their places. On the right an exquisite golden-skinned Latin man was talking in the way people talk to people they have known a long time with a heavy, rumpled man, whom Ilka pegged as Israeli. “Look at the thin man on the left,” Ilka said to Matsue. “He has to be from Washington. Only a Washingtonian’s hair gets to be that particular white color.” Matsue laughed. Ilka asked him if he knew who the woman with the oversized glasses and the white hair straight to the shoulders might be, and Matsue said something that Ilka did not understand. The rest of the panelists were institute people, Ilka’s colleagues—little Joe Bernstine, Yvette Gordot, and Director Leslie Shakespeare in the moderator’s chair.
Leslie had the soft weight of a man who likes to eat and the fine head of a man who thinks. Ilka watched him fussing with the microphone. “Why do we need this?” she could read his lips saying. “I thought we didn’t need microphones in the New Theater?” Now he quieted the hall with a grateful welcome for this fine
attendance at a discussion of one of our generation’s unmanageable questions—the application of justice in an era of genocides.
Here Rabbi Shlomo Grossman rose from the floor and wished to take exception to the plural formulation: “All killings are not murders; all murders are not genocides.”
Leslie said, “Shlomo, could you hold your remarks until question time?”
Rabbi Grossman said, “Remarks? Is that what I’m making? Remarks! The death of six million—is it in the realm of a question?”
Leslie said, “I give you my word that there will be room for the full expression of what you want to say when we open the discussion to the floor.” Rabbi Grossman acceded to the evident desire of the friends sitting near him that he should sit down.
Director Leslie Shakespeare gave a brief account of the combined federal and private funding that had enabled the Concordance Institute to invite these very distinguished panelists to participate in the institute’s Genocide Project. “The institute has a long-standing tradition of ‘debriefings’ in which the participants in a project that is winding down sum up their thinking for the members of the institute, the university, and the public. But this evening’s panel has agreed, by way of an experiment, to talk in an informal way of our notions, of the history of the interest each of us brings to this question—problem—at the point of entry. I want us to interest ourselves in the nature of
inquiry
: will we come out with our original notions reinforced? modified? made over?
“I imagine that this inquiry will range somewhere between the legal concept of a statute of limitations that specifies the time within which human law must respond to a specific crime, and the biblical concept of the visitation of punishment of the sins of the fathers upon the children. One famous version plays itself out in the
Oresteia
, where a crime is punished by an act that is itself a crime and punishable, and so on, down the generations. Enough.
Let me introduce our panel, whom it will be our very great pleasure to have among us in the coming month.”
The white-haired man turned out to be the West German ex-mayor of Obernpest, Dieter Dobelmann. Ilka felt the prompt conviction that she had known all along—that one could tell at a mile—that that mouth, that jaw, had to be German. The woman with the glasses was on loan to the institute from Georgetown University (“There! She’s acquired that white hair!” Ilka whispered to Matsue, who laughed.) She was Jerusalem-born Shulamit Gershon, professor of international law, and advisor to Israel’s ongoing project to identify Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial. The rumpled man was the English theologian Paul Thayer. The Latin really was a Latin—Sebastian Maderiaga, who was taking time off from his consulate in New York. Leslie squeezed up his eyes to see past the stage lights into the well of the New Theater. There was a rustle of people turning to locate the voice that had said, “My father went to the American consulate,” but it seemed to be going to say nothing further and the audience settled back. Leslie introduced Yvette and Joe, the institute’s own fellows assigned to Genocide.
Ilka and Matsue were watching Paulino across the aisle. Paulino was withdrawing his envelope from out of his breast pocket and upturned the envelope onto the slope of his lap. The young student sitting beside him got on his knees to retrieve the sliding batch of newsprint and held onto it while Paulino arranged his coat across his thighs to create a surface.
“My own puzzle,” said Leslie, “with which I would like to puzzle our panel, is this: Where do I, where do we all, get these feelings of moral malaise when wrong goes unpunished and right goes unrewarded?”
Paulino had brought his first newspaper column up to his eyes and read, “La Paz, September 19. Señora Pilar Patillo has reported the disappearance of her husband, Claudio Patillo . . .”
“Where,” Leslie was saying, “does the human mind derive its expectation of a set of consequences for which it finds no evidence in nature or in history, or in looking around its own autobiography? . . . Could I
please
ask for quiet from the floor until we open the discussion?” Leslie was once again peering out into the hall.
The audience turned and looked at Paulino reading, “Nor does the consular calendar for September show any appointment . . .” Shulamit Gershon leaned toward Leslie and spoke to him for several moments while Paulino read, “A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations denies a report . . .”
It was after several attempts to persuade him to stop that Leslie said, “Ahmed? Is Ahmed in the hall? Ahmed, would you be good enough to remove the unquiet gentleman as gently as necessary force will allow. Take him to my office, please, and I will meet with him after the symposium.”
Everybody watched Ahmed walk up the aisle with a large and sheepish-looking student. The two lifted the unresisting Paulino out of his seat by the armpits and carried him reading, “The car of Pilar Patillo, wife of Claudio Patillo . . .” backward, out of the door.
The action had something about it of the classic comedy routine. There was a cackling, then the relief of general laughter. Leslie relaxed and sat back, understanding that it would require some moments to get the evening back on track, but the cackling did not stop. Leslie said, “Please.” He waited. He cocked his head and listened: It was more like a hiccupping that straightened and elongated into a sound drawn on a single breath. Leslie looked at the panel. The panel looked. The audience looked around. Leslie bent his ear down to the microphone. It did him no good to tap it, to turn the button off and on, put his hand over the mouthpiece, to bend down as if to look it in the eye. “Anybody know—is the sound here centrally controlled?” he asked. The noise was growing incrementally. Members of the audience drew their heads
back and down into their shoulders. It came to them—it became impossible to not know—that it was not laughter to which they were listening but somebody yelling. Somewhere there was a person, and the person was screaming.
Ilka looked at Matsue, whose eyes were closed. He looked an old man.
The screaming stopped. The relief was spectacular, but lasted only for that same unnaturally long moment in which a bawling child, having finally exhausted its strength, is only fetching up new breath from some deepest source for a new onslaught. The howl resumed at a volume that was too great for the small theater; the human ear could not accommodate it. People experienced a physical distress and put their hands over their ears.
Leslie had risen. He said, “I’m going to suggest an alteration in the order of this evening’s proceedings. Why don’t we clear the hall—everybody, please, move into the lounge, have some wine, have some cheese while we locate the source of the trouble.”
Quickly, while people were moving along their rows, Ilka popped out into the aisle and collected the trail of Paulino’s news clippings. The student who had sat next to Paulino retrieved and handed her the envelope. Ilka walked down the hall in the direction of Leslie Shakespeare’s office, diagnosing in herself an inappropriate excitement at having it in her power to throw light.
Ilka looked into Leslie’s office. Paulino sat on a hard chair with his back to the door, shaking his head violently from side to side. Leslie stood facing him. He and the panelists, who had disposed themselves around his office, were screwing their eyes up as if wanting very badly to shut every bodily opening through which the understanding receives unwanted information. The intervening wall had somewhat modified the volume, but not the variety—length, pitch, and pattern—of the sounds that continually altered as if in response to a new and continually changing cause.
Leslie said, “Mr. Patillo, we need you to tell us the source of this noise so we can turn this off.”
Paulino said, “It is my father screaming.”
“Or my father,” said Ilka.
Leslie said, “Mr. Patillo is your student, no? He won’t tell us how to locate the screaming.”
“He doesn’t know,” Ilka said. She followed the direction of Leslie’s eye. Maderiaga was perched with a helpless elegance on the corner of Leslie’s desk, speaking Spanish into the telephone. Through the open door that led into Wendy’s outer office, Ilka saw Shulamit Gershon hanging up the phone. She came back in and said, “Patillo is the name this young man’s father adopted from his second wife who was Bolivian. He’s Klaus Herrmann, who headed the German Census Bureau. After the
Anschluss
they sent him to Vienna to put together the registry of Jewish names and addresses, then to Budapest and so on. After the war we traced him to La Paz. I think he got in trouble with some mines or weapons deals. We put him on the back burner when it turned out the Bolivians were after him as well.”
Maderiaga hung up and said, “Hasn’t he been the busy little man! My office is going to check if it’s the Gonzales people who got him for expropriating somebody’s tin mine, or the RRN. If they suspect Patillo of connection with the helicopter crash that killed President Barrientos, they’ll have killed him more or less.”
“My father is screaming,” said Paulino.
“This is nothing to do with his father,” said Ilka. While Matsue was explaining the reverse bug on the blackboard, Ilka had grasped the principle that disintegrated now that she tried to explain it to Leslie. She was distracted by a retrospective image: Last night, hurrying down the corridor, Ilka had turned and must have seen, since she was now able to recollect, Ahmed and Matsue walking together, in the other direction. If Ilka had thought them an odd couple, the thought, having nothing to feed on, died before her lively wish to maneuver Gerti and Paulino into one elevator
before the doors closed so she could come down in the other. Now she asked Ahmed, “Where did you and Matsue go after class last night?”